We regulate public utilities like gas and electricity to ensure they don’t abuse their power. But Google and Facebook are different in so far as they cost us users no money directly and it doesn’t make sense to break them up, since the point of them it that everyone is on one network. At the …
Continue reading ‘Facebook and Google: unregulated monopolies’ »
A while ago I bought fresh roses from Colombia from a firm called Global Rose. Two days after they arrived ads for Global Rose started to appear on the screen whenever I used Google. Targeted advertising, care of Google. It was harmless, but it was the speed with which it happened that startled me. The …
Conventional wisdom in the West has it that national leaders should step down after one or two terms. But the African democracies that are currently thriving – such as Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, Ghana, Kenya and Senegal – all started out with presidents who ruled for at least 18 years. These long-serving leaders bequeathed “peaceful transitions” …
Continue reading ‘Presidents for life aren’t such a bad thing?’ »
“They who are of the opinion that money will do everything may very well be suspected to do everything for money”. (English statesman George Savile, quoted in The Boston Globe)
Barbara Maher of Lancaster University (UK) and her team looked at the brains of 37 people who had lived in Manchester in the UK or Mexico City. All contained millions of iron oxide nanoparticles per gram of brain tissue, suggesting that tiny specks of metal in car exhaust gases seem to fly up our noses …
Continue reading ‘Does air pollution contribute to Alzheimer’s?’ »
